


Hunting the Phoenix

by mattador



Category: Ancient History RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:29:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattador/pseuds/mattador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not what Antinous was born for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chrestomanci (digitalis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalis/gifts).



It was a long time before I accepted any of it. I believed I was born to better things. Call that arrogance or premonition, I don’t care. it’s the place of the beloved to demur, to give his hunter a chase. The easily won prize is never valued. You may wrap and embalm me in platitudes as you will, but the truth is still that I never wished for any of it.

I was nine years old when a great procession overflowed the streets of Nicomedia, where I had been sent to take my lessons among other boys of my age.

I strayed close, from curiosity, and all too quickly I was drawn into the expositions - games, races, recitals, and marvels all performed for the benefit of the emperor, Publius Aelianus Hadrianus Augustus.

I cared little for that. Bythinia was all I knew. I had written in the same sand as Catullus, I had played in Pliny’s vineyards, and I was a proud rustic. I could not have been more a creature of the woods and the wild waters if I were a satyr. What were emperors to me? I wrestled, and ran, and chanted poems aloud, and stared at the two-headed snake they brought; and I admit I stared again at the Emperor from afar. There was something leonine in him, those broad cheekbones and flat nose amidst russet curls, and I thought it very impressive that he was so like the face upon my coins. But he did not long catch my eye, nor - lying poets set aside - did I catch his.

But I did catch another’s, and that is what bent my fate, from pastoral lover to urban beloved.

I knew my Catullus better than all the other boys and I paid mind to what he meant, and how it was to be said. I was best, a preening little starling. So I thought it only my due when a stringy stick of an old man came to question me on matters of poetry and rhetoric. I thought perhaps he was a tutor looking for a job. It was not until he questioned my family and I trotted out the accustomed lies that I realized he was acting as a procurer, and not until later that he was personal secretary to the Emperor. My invitation to join that august entourage came that evening, directly to my guardians, and my protests of ‘my father, my father’ fell on deaf ears. One did not decline the Emperor’s request, no matter how modestly and tentatively it was issued. My family, or at least that part of it, was timorous, obedient, gods-fearing.

I have never been those things. My first night among the other boys so recruited, I took immediate steps to unbend what I thought of as my destiny. I seized the knife used to carve joints from the roast and held it untrembling against the dimple where jaw and cheek and throat meet. I would, I promised, disfigure myself before I would submit, and I demanded at once to see the man who had brought me. Or bought me, I supposed, not with coine but with supple, gloved threat and effulgent promise.

He came, bemused, and we negotiated, with my face as hostage. I asked to go home, and he declined. I said I would serve as a stable-boy or a shepherd instead. He told me the Roman Legions needed no Bythinian Edymions.

I was to be Ganymede.

A page-boy, then, I said. But not to the Emperor, and no more than a page-boy. I would not submit. I made obscure appeals, including one in the name of Pliny, who had been a friend of my family, and others, using other family names.

He made murmur about heroic temperament, and smiled his narrow, homely smile, and accepted. So, for some few months, I became household page to Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.

It was not to last, but it was… what is the best word? It was an education to me in qualities I lacked. Quiet. Restraint. Tact. Surrender.

In eleven weeks I went from a fulminous young bacchante, a proud and intemperate savage, to a mock-Roman. No virtue they hold higher than the skill and discipline to drive the chariot of one’s emotions, rather than being madly dragged through life by them, as Phaethon (or so many of the Olympians who gave license to their passions.) I learned to hold my peace and to see what was before me, and not what I feared or desired.

Suetonius was not intemperate, but it was not from him, always occupied by his stylus, that I learned this art. Instead, I gathered its seeds from the most frequent visitor to his quarters.

Vibia Sabina was yet beautiful in her thirties, as headstrong as the Empress Plotina who had raised her, and - like Plotina with Trajan - independent of her husband.

No other could so alternate caustic and demure, striking and bland, as suited the moment and its purposes. For his learning, his dedication, his humane reserve and his dry utterances, I admired Suetonius. But it was Sabina who was my model for myself; it is an irony not lost on my, I assure you.

It has been said that Suetonius seduced her, or that he fascinated her until she seduced him. It has been said that he derided her, or that he spoke too candidly of the Emperor’s disregard for her. What I will tell you is that they argued passionately, memorably. Their crime against Hadrian was primarily that they refused to be defined by him - and when he became aware of it, they declined to reveal their mysteries to him, much like Secundus the Silent did. Like I would decline, I thought.

Affair or insult, as you like. Suetonius was dismissed with but an hour’s warning, escaping with his scrolls and with his head. Then, I suppose, I could have fled, or sought dismissal, or in one of many ways shaped my life’s cometary trajectory.

But I was ten, and nervous, and far from home, and I did hunger for the luxuries that surrounded me, as my due - benedictions I had never before known but always felt entitled to. I attached myself to Sabina’s stables. A little Greek page was an undesired bucolic novelty, but a firm voice and a soft hand with a horse being virtues no Roman would decline.

I grew. I was a beautiful boy. I have implied that, if not said it outright, and years of sun and travel were kind to me - even years of hay and manure. I stole moments to read, or to idle in the shadows outside the Empress’ salons, growing wise, I thought, by the reflected light of her poets’ grace. maybe. But as young men who are denied anything will, I grew sullen and melancholy. I was paranoid of omens. I was wary, and feral, and only slowly did age and proximity to luxury tame me, for I was beautiful, and I knew what that meant.

At eighteen, with my sideburns growing in, and the dangers of boyhood falling behind me, when the court ventured once more toward Athens, I grew incautious.

What a terrible mixed joy my moments of incaution have been.


	2. Chapter 2

Athens had always been a homecoming for the Emperor. More than Rome, more than the Omphalos, it was the center of the world. All good things, all wisdom and virtue, emanated from Athens, a light that had shone for half a millennium. Publius Aelius Trajanus Hadrianus Augustus was more a Greek than a Roman in his heart, or at least his detractors whispered that, and Athens boasted of it. From my decade skirting the peripheries of his orbit, I had never seen this Greekness. But then, I would define it differently. 

This visit was different. The expected light did not shine. Hadrian had always been a seeker of otherworldly knowledge. He drew it to himself, collected it. Astronomers, augurs, philosophers - he hungered after what they knew, or what he thought they knew. It was that which lead him to attempt to force speech from Secundus the Silent. And the philosopher’s tirade in return - written, mercifully, to preserve his oaths of silence - that began a new and darker era of knowledge. Ill portents, grim superstitions, whether they came from the color of Hadrian’s mind or the true influence of the stars is a fine distinction of little importance. What mattered was that he grew tense and vituperative, insecure of place and future. Hadrian was a man of precautions, but what precautions can be taken against the emanations of fate, or premonitions of tragedy? 

Still, he tried. A chain of ill luck was needed to bring him to me. An omen at a construction site sent him out of the city for a day of riding - a second sign hinted to him that his own stable was unsafe, and sent him to plunder his wife’s train, where I was groom.

If you have ever imagined seeing a god, you may understand an emperor a little. Your life is on the scales every moment he gazes upon you or contemplates your name. I was not awed by it, but I was conscious of it. No. That is too light a word. I was terrified of him, as sailors are said to fear the sea.

Imagine then if you will that, while you are under this regard, you become conscious of the fact that this icon was a man, as fallible as yourself, as victim to moods and vicissitudes, stars and tides. I have spoken of this to many, since it happened, and all said the same: they would fear more, that the power so embodied might be carelessly wielded. You do not wish to see the arms of Atlas tremble wearily. For me, already in dread of this man who appeared before me with the suddenness of any eidolon, demanding mounts for himself and his escorts, snappish of their quality, it was not so.

I permitted myself to be chastised, eyes downcast, trembling. After he departed I went only slowly back to my work, thinking that I had heard something I did not understand, while I had stood studying my sandals. The emperor was a storm, and for nine years I had weathered thoughtless buffets cast at me from afar, driving me from my course. I had witnessed clouds and thunder before. But they had been impersonal, as this had not.

I was still digging my fingers in the clay of that thought, teasing shapes from it, when he returned. I had taken myself to clean the filth from the stalls furthest from the entrance - let the hungry-eyed who sought a moment of glory shed on them find it! - and so I was bent, sweeping, and when I saw only the shod feet and bare calves that rounded the corner to speak with me, I did not mark whose they were, and kept my eyes upon my work. He cleared his throat, and I continued, and he gave a weak laugh to preface himself.

“If I chafe under my burdens, it is still beneath me to hang those weights around the necks of lessers,” he said, and I looked up, startled. So I met the Emperor’s eyes for the first time since I was a boy of nine, as close now as we had been distant then, alone rather than with a festival-crowd separating us. I do not think he remembered me. I do not believe he had ever given a second moment of thought to the fate of the boy he had sent his secretary to obtain, and never again noted.

But the same look was in his eyes in both moments. And I possessed no more shields to hide behind nor knives to avail myself of.


	3. Chapter 3

I left Athens at Hadrian’s elbow, mounted beside him, his personal groom. I was cognizant of the honor. I wondered if the Empress, who had once known my story, recalled it now, or if she had spoken a word on my behalf. But I had never received any particular patronage from her, and she had for years said no word to me beyond which horse I was to take particular care in currying or cleaning hooves. 

Hadrian unreeled from me my biography, as succinctly as I had always given it, and found it charming, I think. We spoke of Pliny and Catullus - or at least, he lectured and I listened, but there was a life in his voice, and his words were not a scholar’s, but… what should I call it? A student’s, perhaps. His interest was vivid, and fixed on the words of those dead gentlemen as surely as on my curls or my eyes. I ventured wary opinions and anecdotes, and he accepted them with charitable affection. He thought me sullen, or feral, and it was a likeness that had always served me well, an act I ould wear as comfortably as any cloak. I clung to it. I drank wine with him when we stopped at night, but when he spoke to me of Socrates and Alcibiades I demurred, and plead weariness and duty. I think the novelty, the surprise of my retreat, was key to its success.

But it did not dissuade him. He grew curious of me. And as we traced a path south and east, curving around the edge of the sea towards Egypt, I grew slowly to see that the shadow of Athens was still with him. He was by turns irascible and melancholic when he dealt with matters of state. I thought perhaps that my simplicity or my frankness disarmed him - or at least, my semblance of those same things - but in Judea I watched him engage and dissect the arguments of an elder there, speaking stubbornly on behalf of his people, and saw the Emperor grow taciturn and wrathful at this fearless intransigence.

That same night, he still laughed with me as we spoke of hunting, hearing lions cough in the night beyond the boundaries of light limning our tents, I knew my worth, and I knew the signs when another had become enamored of me. But this suitor was no bold camp follower, no horse-trainer for the Empress, who I might discourage outright.

I was forthright, or I was moody, but I never forgot the Emperor’s opinion of his place and mine, and I never spoke an intemperate word that would mark me as anything above his servant. He was not kind to those who navigated position poorly. 

So we proceeded, circling delicately. I was as gratified at his finesse as I was dismayed by his persistence. There were days when the demands of Rome ate every moment of his time, and on those days I found myself reflecting on his drollness, his incisive wit. There was something about the peremptory brusqueness, even, which could charm if I allowed it, and I dared not. No romance across a gulf such as ours could end well. Not for both of us, at least. When doldrums settled on him, or the anxieties that drove him again to consult fortune-tellers and visit magicians, I saw that more clearly than ever. We must never be close.

Perhaps you can see now. It was not what was Emperor in him that drew me to him. It was what was flawed and human, that even he saw. He loved the surprise he had in me, the beauty, perhaps the thoughtfulness, the self-gratifying and self-centered impulses a master does not look for in a servant. Maybe attraction is always so: neither the strange nor the familiar, but the juxtaposition of both, is the appeal. 

Months had passed, and a familiar routine settled on us, by the time we reached Alexandria. I was conscious in the evenings when musicians entertained us all together of Sabina’s smoky eyes on the pair of us. I felt discomforted. Judged. She did not favor her husband, but she favored being displaced even less, and I felt… disloyal, I suppose. She had shielded me from what I feared, what she despised, and now I supplanted her, or seemed to. I was discreet in my continued delays. I feared by now that coyness added to my appeal, but it was too late for another sort of evasion, and it was vital that Hadrian be allowed to save face. Even if he courted me, if it was known he had not won me, it would sting his pride. And… may I admit it? I was flattered, even as his focus became unseemly, as songs were sent to me, delicacies fed me. I cherished luxuries. I had missed them for so long.

Travelling through the hinterlands, we had hunted frequently, whenever there was game worth having, and Hadrian chased it with the same fixed fervor. Nor did I ever see game escape him. But then, it did not escape me, either, when I chose the chase. Our passions were well-matched, if your positions were not, and after such a time of pursuit, it should not surprise that I felt myself superior in all ways but one. 

The lion hunt changed that, and twisted my path again.


	4. Chapter 4

To sit a running horse with a spear in your hand is to feel immortal. The world rushes by, and you command its motion. Power sits in your hand to dispense as you will. A hot wind, a growl, the scratchy caress of sand and the glare of the sun, all these things are no more than distractions. To live in that moment is to feel that you will live forever.

It is not for nothing that when mortals tell tales of immortals, however admiring, the immortals often sound foolish.

I have a great disinterest in recounting to you each episode, each conversation, each sigh of the fall or rise of my life. Moments rarely matter. Context seldom. What drives us is feeling. To know me, to guess at any mystery I may have shown you, nothing is necessary but that you feel what I felt, as I felt it, and the frippery of detail only intrudes on the picture I have framed for you. 

Listen. We rode on hunt together for royal game, for the lion I so often compared Hadrian to in the privacy of my mind, and in the heady exaltation of the moment, I truly believed myself sovereign to all mortal concerns. I rushed at the beast, full of victory and anticipating nothing but. I cast my javelins, and stained that tawny hide wine-red. I took my spear in hand, closing the distance, and drove the point deep behind the lion’s shoulder as it charged. It screamed, and I screamed, and with the shaft of the spear vibrating like a plucked harp-string between us, we were one. I felt the sear of its fury, as pure as my elation, and it rose, the smooth uncoiling of its hind legs wrenching the spear from my hand. It gripped at the side of my horse, inches from my leg, claws flexing and raking, and I followed the spear, tumbling from the saddle as my horse remembered its own mortality. The ground jarred me. I choked on dust, and tasted blood against my teeth, and I looked into the lion’s eyes. It had seemed different from afar. Here, close, I could see shock, and pain, and implacable will. I had offended it, and it would destroy me, because it feared, as all mortal things fear, and because there can be only one answer to terror that profound.

Then, hooves parted us, walling us apart, and I gazed up to see Hadrian sillohuetted against the sun, snarl on his face, haloed by sunlight until I would have thought him younger than I, vital with radiance. The lion’s eyes were puzzled as Hadrian drove his own spear down, as unprepared as I was.

He descended from his horse and offered me his hand, and I seized it, and clung to him. Ten years of fear were transformed to gratitude. I wanted the glory I saw in him. I wanted the certainty. I wanted the power to make myself known truly, to write myself upon him the way that he had written himself on my life - and, I suppose, on the Empire. I had listened to him for so long, and I had felt him watch me. Now I wanted to see him, and to be heard.

He did not understand. But I came to his tent that evening, with the skin of the lion draped as a curtain over it, and in that dark space, redolent with musk and iron as if with incense, I drove him to take me, to possess me as he wanted and I had dreaded. Only when we were both sated, wrapped around one another and shivering as if in a fever-dream, did I regain what I had felt in those moments on the hunt. Now I was as drunk on him as he had been upon the merest idea of me. It was Elysian.


	5. Chapter 5

We conquered one another. Once cautious, now reckless, we made ourselves fools. He was no less enchanted with my acquiescence than he had been by my flight, and he compared me to a bird, a falcon - falconry being a way of hunting we had only just been tutored in along the journey. His sullen hawk, now tamed and clutching his wrist, eating from his hand, haughty and powerful and unconscious of so much nuance. I liked the comparison, but I asked that he might call me after a wiser creature, for I knew more than he thought. So he called me after that purple-plumed bird native to Egypt. And I… I began to fear again, even as he had left his dark moments behind him. 

It was his own age and mortality that had driven him to distraction before, his incomprehension at a future he could not rule or understand so shrewdly as he understood all else. In Greece he had penetrated the mysteries of Dionysus and Persephone, who had walked the paths of the underworld and emerged in bright day again after. Here he sought after the mysteries of Osiris, clothing himself gladly in the pomp of a pharoah. Caesars are only deified after they have passed, but pharoahs do not need to wait for that escalation. Even as light-hearted as he had become, he still consulted mystics and necromancers, and the land around Alexandria was rich with them.

I could not bear to think on it. The fear of death, the certainty of it, were what had driven him to the excess of courage for my sake. They may even have been what lead him to seek a young and beautiful lover at the first, to hope he could see some part of himself reflected in me. 

I had tried to tell him what I knew, again and again. Sometimes he would not hear of it, believing me a poet only. Other times, when more persuasive phrases entered my mind, my lips remained closed, unable to force him to see what was before him. Nightmares still troubled his sleep. In time they would return to the waking world.

It is clear, is it not, why I had to do as I did? To slip from our shared couch after the sun-barge had descended below the edge of the sky, dress myself briefly, and come down to the riverside? There were only two fates for us. Either he would have had all from me, eventually, or I would have lost him. All travelers part on their journey. All of them. For his good, and for my own, I chose a sooner time. I undressed on the banks of the Nile as swiftly as I had dressed. Before my heart could hesitate, I stepped into the water.

I could only pray, father, that after I was gone, he might understood what I had told him, and what he had seen.

**Author's Note:**

> I owe a great debt to any number of sources I used for research. I read or skimmed twenty different books, nonfiction and fiction alike, on Hadrian, Antinous, Sabina, and Suetonius. Many simply provided me with background detail or ambience, few informed the final work, and only one was actively unhelpful. That *one* I will omit from my citations as a kindness to the author. The ones I drew from most heavily are listed below, in no particular order.
> 
> Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar  
> Following Hadrian, by Elizabeth Speller  
> Hadrian: The Restless Emperor, by Anthony R. Birley  
> Beloved and God, by Royston Lambert  
> Scriptore Historiae Augustae, by Aelius Spartianus et. al., in the translation by David Magie. (Other translations are available, sometimes under other titles, ranging from the Vita Hadriani to Vitae Caesarum to Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversus compositae.)


End file.
